It was entirely in character that John Hume, when he announced on Monday that he was stepping down as leader of the SDLP, would use the occasion to speak directly to the leadership of the republican movement.
His plea returned to a theme he has stressed in the past: "I make a particular appeal to Sinn FΘin at the present time and say to them that in implementing the decommissioning aspect of the Good Friday agreement, you are implementing the will of the Irish people." John never missed an opportunity to drive home the message he wanted to get across. He knew very well that his opponents sneered at "Humespeak", the language of compromise which is now part of everybody's political vocabulary. He once told me "When a man in a pub repeats to me something that I've said, and genuinely believes that it's his own idea, I know I must be doing something right."
So many tributes have been paid to Hume in the past two days that it seems a bit self-indulgent to want to add my two-penny worth. But I've known John since October 1968, through the long years of violence and attrition in Northern Ireland as well as the dawning of a new hope for a better future.
I first met him in the old City Hotel in Derry in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. Heady days of innocence and hope, when it seemed that the years of dicrimination and injustice could be put right by mass marches across Craigavon Bridge.
The lounge of the hotel would be crowded every night with people discussing whether or not next weekend's protest would be banned. In the early hours, politics gave way to singing. This was long before The Town I Love So Well was as much as a twinkle in Phil Coulter's eye, and John would give an emotional rendering of that ballad of love betrayed, The Butcher Boy.
Sometimes - though not often enough - he would be accompanied by his wife, Pat, a beautiful young woman with long hair streaming down her back. Derry at that time was a deeply chauvinist town and it was obvious that women were not expected to express political views in public. That changed with the arrival of Bernadette Devlin.
As I got to know them it became clear how much John, as a political loner, depended on his wife. Not just for love and support through the bleak years of violence and attrition, but for her political judgment. Like very many people who have lived through those years, I believe we owe peace in the North to John Hume's political creativity and to Pat's extraordinary grace under pressure.
Much has been said and written in recent days of Hume's political gifts: the steadfast adherence to non-violence, the imagination he brought to redefining Wolfe Tone's strategy for achieving a united Ireland, the wooing of Irish-American political support. Some of my own lasting memories are of the bad times, when it seemed that the British could only reach for more security and this State just wished that the whole ghastly mess would go away.
One would meet John, obviously preoccupied, and he'd say, "I've got an idea, what do you think?" Sometimes these ideas would seem like crazy dreams: that the Secretary of State should make a speech declaring that the British had no long-term political interest in Northern Ireland; or that the Irish Government should set up a conference for all nationalist parties on the island to look at possible political options for the future.
He couldn't have achieved these things without the help of many other people. Seamus Mallon was called on - or more often just expected - to hold the SDLP together when many in the party were highly critical of their leader.
Officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs worked tirelessly to achieve his dream of an agreed Ireland, even though Hume could be an extremely difficult visionary to deal with.
There were also times when his political views and his style fell out of favour, in Dublin as well as London. From those days I remember the scene in a country cemetery when one of the victims of the Greysteel attack, which came in retaliation for the IRA bomb in the Shankill Road, was being buried. Many people wanted John to end his talks with Gerry Adams after the Shankill killings and, when a young woman pushed her way through to talk to him, some of us were apprehensive that she might be about to attack him verbally.
Instead, she took his hands and said "Mr Hume, our family want you to know that last night, when we were gathered around our daddy's coffin, we prayed for you to succeed in your work for peace." He turned away, close to tears and gestured to Pat to take over. Now, once again, it seems that the whole peace process is facing another impasse. We must not be melodramatic about this. There is no sign that the present leadership of the IRA has any inclination to return to war. But the republican movement has reason to heed John Hume when he says that after last week's tragedies in the United States, the whole political climate in regard to terrorism has changed.
The British and Irish governments, not to mention Washington, have been patient with Sinn FΘin's difficulties in persuading the IRA to move on weapons. But Gerry Adams must know that that tolerance is over. Ironically, the very scale of the disaster in the United States presents the republican movement with an opportunity to state publicly that there is no place for violence, or the threat of violence, in democratic politics and to make the necessary movement on putting arms beyond use.
mholland@irish-times.ie